Your Mind Is Not to Be Trusted

Bacon: "Only by seeing with one's own eyes can one make a judgment." Descartes: "Only through rational analysis can one make a judgment."

Hume: "Neither seeing with one's own eyes nor rational analysis can serve as a basis for judgment." Kant: "By combining seeing with one's own eyes and rational analysis, one can make a judgment."

The Buddha: "Only by knowing that seeing with one's own eyes is illusion, and knowing that rational analysis is conceptual proliferation (prapañca), can one possibly make a meaningful 'judgment.'"

Since beginningless kalpas, sentient beings have seen with their own eyes countless people, affairs, things, and principles—which of these perceptions has ever been correct? If their perceptions were correct, there would no longer be the afflictions of greed, hatred, and delusion, nor the suffering of birth-and-death saṃsāra. How many people possess the capacity for rational analysis? If rational analysis were correct and error-free, how could there still be the afflictions of greed, hatred, and delusion, and the suffering of birth-and-death saṃsāra?

The Buddha said: Beware of trusting your own mind, for your mind is not to be trusted; only after attaining the fruit of an arhat may you trust your own mind.

Yet even after attaining the fruit of an arhat, there is still so much ignorance that one still cannot completely trust one's own mind.

Countless people trust their own minds, yet that mind of theirs is like this today and like that tomorrow, constantly changing its mind, and by the time of death it has not gotten many things right—so is that mind reliable? It is quite unreliable, yet people trust themselves until the very moment of death. Most people who study Buddhism see one thing as good today, study it for a few days and then reject it; after a while they see something else as good, study it for a few more days, and then reject it again. Even at seventy or eighty years old they still have not found a dharma gate that satisfies them, yet they remain very self-assured. If they were truly self-assured, once they accepted one thing they would neither reject it nor change it again. If by fifty or sixty years of age one still cannot settle on a path and method of practice, is there any hope left in this lifetime?